Untitled, Anna Shteynshleyger

Untitled (Kolyma), Anna Shteynshleyger

Untitled (Puddles), Anna Shteynshleyger

From her series Siberia, photographs of three sites of gulag prison camps.

"I'm not interested in the political side of it at all. I don't deny it and know it filters into the work, but I'm just not approaching it from that perspective. I'm interested in exploring inner exile and profound beauty as redemptive and liberating. There is that famous Dostoyevsky quote that ‘Beauty will redeem the world.’

– in an email to Tim Davis

"Anna’s photographs of Siberia, a territory as suffused with suffering as any place on the planet, do not 'bear witness' to anything. They are not documents of anyone’s journey. They are not war monuments; they are not apologies. Though her camera is pointing in the direction of historical sites of unremembered trauma, her pictures are not records of the locations of past crimes. They do not reckon with the past. They sidestep the inevitable failure of the photograph to stand for historical events. They are oblique and difficult, refusing any Spielbergian urge to heal through reliving previous horrors."

– Tim Davis's Review, "A Landscape Purged"


One more review.  See also: City of Destiny.